Browse/search page navigations are not added to the browser history

[chaoran-chen]

At the moment, if we go to the browse page and perform searches, navigate between result pages and open entries as modal, it changes the URL but it does not add new entries to the browser history. The implication is that if you go back a page, you will leave the page entirely.

Screen.Recording.2024-10-03.at.13.43.21.mov

I think that the correct behavior should be that every change of URL gets pushed to the browser history.

[theosanderson]

My opinion on ideal behaviour would be

• pagination adds to history [this is a discrete event]
• changing search filters does not add to history [not a discrete event]
• (no strong feelings on modal opening - which isn't yet in the URL, but we should add - but happy for that to be in history)

[chaoran-chen]

I can see that it is a bit difficult with the search filters because if a user adds multiple filters, we don't know whether they consider it as multiple searches or just one search but I'd personally rather add a bit more to the history than not enough as missing something in the history would be losing information. For me (and this might because I have a mouse with back and forward buttons), having to go back multiple pages is less annoying then loosing a page from a history. E.g., if I enter a lot filters to search something and then delete a few, I would want to have the option to go back and see the previous search and not have to enter all the filters again.

We could maybe check out how related pages do that. I tried out Zalando but they actually have a big bug:

Screen.Recording.2024-10-03.at.14.03.09.mov

[theosanderson]

I definitely have had the experience of getting frustrated at having too much in the history. (Mainly on my own sites I was developing, I think). But yeah, opinions will differ :)